Re-Presentations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Portrayals in Fiction ...

Hunt’s main contribution to the biography of Lizzie and Gabriel was the allegation that Lizzie had left a suicide note blaming Rossetti’s cruelty and unfaithfulness for her decision to take her life. The note pinned to her nightgown allegedly read, “My life is so miserable I wish for it no more” (Hunt 305). This note was supposedly suppressed by Rossetti and Brown. But Rossetti’s niece, Helen Rossetti Angeli, first in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement and then in her 1941 book, refutes Hunt’s claim that Lizzie’s note cast blame on Gabriel: “The account given in The Wife of Rossetti of the finding of Lizzie Rossetti’s last message, and the message itself are untrue,” she wrote, “and I speak on the basis of more reputable and direct ‘oral evidence’ ” (Angeli 272). Angeli offers a story told by her mother, Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti—Ford Madox Brown’s daughter. She claims that the note read, “Take care of Harry,” referring to Lizzie’s weak-minded brother mentioned by William Michael Rossetti in his Memoir (197). Marsh comments on the unorthodoxy of Hunt’s biography, describing it as melodramatic, and disparages Hunt’s suggestion that Rossetti murdered his wife (Legend 103). Nevertheless, like the exhumation of Lizzie, the story of the note took on its own life and remained extant for others to exploit if they chose.

In 1964 Rossetti’s letters to Jane Morris, part of the estate of May Morris, became available at the British Museum and spurred a reassessment of Rossetti by Rosalie Glynn Grylls, Lady Mander. Grylls’ home, Wightwick Manor, had been decorated by William Morris and held a notable collection of Pre-Raphaelite art. Grylls wrote a sympathetic biography, Portrait of Rossetti, in which she inverted the usual interpretation of Lizzie and Gabriel’s relationship with the following question: “It is usually considered the root of their trouble that Rossetti could not bring himself to the point of marriage with Lizzie, but is it not possible that at the outset it was she who would not consent to marry him?” (54). Grylls acknowledges that Rossetti was unfaithful to Lizzie: “Rossetti was at the prime of his vigor as a man and as an artist, showing ‘magnificent animality’…and Fanny was a woman who could provide the satisfaction that Lizzie could not, would not, give” (72). Yet she